So Blumhouse just gave me a very entertaining experience at the theater with their new film Speak No Evil. A remake of a Danish film from 2022 starring James McAvoy, Mackenzie Davis, Aisling Franciosi & Scoot McNairy is usually something that I don’t always enjoy. Films that recently don’t need remakes that fast, and it just feels like they get remade because folks from the US don’t like to read subtitles. Yet I’ve been proven wrong before; this time, I was wrong again. So get this McNairy & Davis play Ben & Louise Dalton, a married couple with an eleven-year-old daughter named Agnes (Alix West Lefler) are on vacation in Italy where they meet a friendly European family of Paddy (McAvoy) & Ciara (Franciosi) with their son Ant (Dan Hough). The two couples bond a bit, mostly between Paddy and Ben, as Paddy is more of an “alpha” man than Ben, who is pretty down-bad right now. When they all leave, Paddy & Ciara invite Ben & Louise to their farmhouse out in the UK. Once back home in London, these folks decide to go back on vacation and visit these people on this shady-looking farm. Here, Daltons have the most awkward stayover we’ve seen in a long while, with Paddy continually linestepping and Louise not feeling it, with Ben looking increasingly inept as the film continues. Yet things are not what they seem, especially with Ant, and since this is a thriller, things go a pretty bad way for the Daltons.
So this film isn’t a comedy, but like many Blumhouse films I’ve seen in the past, it’s able to have the characters react in a way that conveys the absurdness of the situation they are in and do so in a believable way. The scenes between McNairy and Davis are really good. The film does well by showing this married couple going through a hard time in their marriage and having the extreme experience to bring them back together, so their scenes together where they disagree are very much grounded in something you can understand, and even when they do something “horror movie stupid,” it still works as an allegory for something more mundane. I found the ineptitude of McNairy’s Ben he is in no way the hero at times; he’s at best Shaggy in a Scooby Doo episode – you can feel the need for a ZOINKS when he fails at protecting his family from threats to even the earlier scenes of him being negged to oblivion. Davis’ Louise, though, is great and not surprising as she also played a half Terminator once, so it’s very rousing when she’s going hard in the paint in the last act. Speak No Evil isn’t a transcendent horror film, and it’s not trying to be, but it’s very good at film and a great theater experience. It’s definitely something I’d like to watch again.
Score: B
